When I say the words “Rio Rancho” to you, committed multi-modal urbanist planning advocate and Better Burque reader, your first reaction probably involves an uncontrollable itching, ringing in the ears, and involuntary esophageal response. Rio Rancho is the veritable “Don’t Bee” in the Romper Room of multi-modal urbanist planning.

So imagine my surprise yesterday, when in the course of my daily rabbit hole to the molten core of Earth Internet clicking I call “professional research,” I came across this set of webpages from Don’t Bee.

Do you spot what I so helpfully enclose in a red rectangle above? Can you believe it, person used to City of Albuquerque lack of road project transparency? Not only does City o’ Vision have a “Current City Projects” page, that page is current AND includes “Hybrid Mill & Inlay Projects” organized by City Council District.

And get this! Not only do you get actual contact info for actual Project Managers and name of Contract Company, you also get project costs and a map detailing the exact scope of the project!

For those who haven’t banged their multi-modal urbanist heads against cinder blocks trying to find such information from the City of Albuquerque website, this is stuff NEVER found at City of Albuquerque.

And what is “this stuff”?

Stepping back from amazed researcher to pedant, “Hybrid Mill & Inlay” is the principal form of what is much more widely known as “repaving.” Every roadway jurisdiction has a project list of roads to repave in any given fiscal/calendar year, and, unlike City of Albuquerque, sprawltastic Rio Rancho actually takes the time and effort to inform its citizenry about these projects.

Now despite my self-appointed “professional researcher” status, I might be mistaken and City o’ ABQ does, in fact, have webpages outlining its annual repaving projects. But I don’t think so. I really don’t think so, because I have looked and looked and looked, and so have other local multi-modal urbanist advocates. There’s a list of special projects, some with links, many without links, but no pages devoted to scheduled repaving projects.

Outcomes resulting from this lack of transparency run from layperson neighbors who suddenly find out their street is getting repaved to multi-modal urbanist advocates being left in the dark on the internal City process known as the “Complete Streets Review Committee.”

This committee of City folks and a curated sprinkling of volunteer board members takes a look at every planned repaving job in late Winter/early Spring before the repaving year starts when the weather warms. The committee created via the City’s Complete Streets Ordinance goes over maps like the below and debates/decides (to an extent) on things like whether the bike lane should be 3 feet or 5 feet on this job performed in 2019.

While the Complete Streets Review Committee is a step toward broader involvement in roadway engineering decision-making, it’s still a lousy misstep in terms of transparency *IF YOU DON’T HAVE A WEBPAGE OR OTHER VENUE TO SHARE THE COMMITTEE’S WORK!

Longer rant short, the City of Albuquerque could learn a thing or two from our multi-modal urbanist dreaded, break-away sprawltastic neighbor to the northwest. More broadly, City of Albuquerque could do something, anything, please for the love of God!, toward updating/expanding its website. It is quite literally the worst municipal website your humble “professional researcher” sees, and he unfortunately has to see it a lot. It is an abomination.

Specifically, the City’s Department of Municipal Development (DMD) could stand to spend a few minutes checking out the Rio Rancho site/pages to better understand what is possible and what DMD has, heretofore, made impossible.

If it takes shaming DMD and the City into doing it because it looks so bad compared with its northwest neighbor, your humble professional researcher is not above doing that. Obviously.

*The posted screenshot of the Moon NE repaving job is only available online because it was part of a Greater Albuquerque Bicycle Advisory Committee meeting presentation. Full Disclosure: I was said presenter.